Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare

"Halliwell-Phillipps was the hardest working man in the show business of Shakespeare in the 19th century. His work is marked by a certain kind of doggedness. This was a man who was tireless in his pursuit of any documents that would cast light on Shakespeare’s life. He did find a few things that other people hadn’t, but in the end he discovered very little. It’s not a ‘read’, it’s an outline. In other words, this, unlike my other choices, is not a book for non-experts. This is the kind of book in which a scholar who is patient enough to plough through the 700 pages will find things that will not appear in recent biographies that should have made it into a standard account of Shakespeare’s life. Well one of the questions I’m often asked is, ‘How could Shakespeare have written the plays if his will left behind no evidence that he owned any books?’ It’s a perfectly reasonable and only slightly anachronistic question. And the answer is that Shakespeare’s will had an inventory – that is, a separate list of his possessions – which his son-in-law took to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office in London to get officially approved, in the same way all the legal matters following Shakespeare’s death were taken care of. Unfortunately this inventory is lost. But scholars writing biographies after Halliwell-Phillipps did not pick up on Halliwell-Phillipps’s discovery that, in fact, the story I’ve just told you is documented, and he was the first to document this. So when I was researching my most recent book, I was browsing through Halliwell-Phillipps and discovered this. I mentioned it to Stanley Wells, who knows more about Shakespeare than anyone alive today, and even he did not remember this and was fascinated by the story. He’s probably following it up as we speak! So there are still facts that have already been discovered about Shakespeare that are not really circulating widely, and the best place to look for them is in Halliwell-Phillipps."